The club has always written about itself. Between 2012 and 2015 it did it on a mailing list, in agendas and attachments. From 2014 it also started doing it on WeChat, in public, with photographs — and when the mailing list stopped, WeChat was the only thing left.
That matters because of what the other sources do not cover. The first website ends in 2009. The mailing list ends in 2015. Douban was deleted. Between 2015 and 2019 there is a five-year stretch where the club’s WeChat account is the only place any of it was written down.
What these posts are
Not minutes. Somebody who had been at the meeting sat down afterwards and wrote about it, usually the same week, usually in a mixture of English and Chinese, usually at speed.
So they record the things minutes do not. Who brought fruit. Who had practised a speech ten times on the bus and in the shower. Which member had been competing for president for years and kept losing and kept entering. What a guest said on the way out.
The English in them is frequently wrong, and it has been left alone. Where a post is quoted on a meeting page, it is quoted as written. Correcting it would remove the person who wrote it.
What they added to this site
Two hundred and nineteen meetings that had no page at all now have one, most of them between 2014 and 2019. Where a post recorded who ran the evening, who spoke and who won the ribbons, that is on the page. Where it recorded a story worth keeping, the club’s own sentences are quoted underneath. Forty-six pages that already existed gained something they were missing, usually the awards.
Eight club events that were never Tuesday meetings also came back: five outings, a contest and two anniversary parties.
What they do not settle
Most posts do not give the date of the meeting they describe, only the date they were posted. Where the date had to be worked out — a write-up posted on the Thursday describes the Tuesday before it; an invitation posted on the Friday describes the Tuesday after — the page says so and marks the date approximate.
Twenty-one posts are listed in the account’s own index but would not load. They are still listed. Nothing has been reconstructed from a title.
The whole evening summarised as D-C-P, after the workshop that ran that night: delightful for the table topics, cool for the member who took both Best Table Topic and Best Evaluator, professional for the visitor from Shanghai who told a folk tale about a mouse deer and a crocodile and won best prepared speech.
The table topics master put eight wrapped gifts in a handbag with numbers on the outside and had people draw one, then say who they would give it to. One member drew an air ticket and said he had never been abroad, so he would keep it. Another drew an empty bag and said that emptying yourself out and thinking properly is a present too.
The write-up thanks three members by name for bringing mooncakes and fruit so the club could celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival a week ahead of everyone else.